Data compression and decompression are well techniques for reducing either the bandwidth or the amount of memory needed to respectively carry or store data, for example video data, i.e. television-type signals, seismic data or sound or audio data. Compression typically eliminates unnecessary information content from the signal. Well known methods of video compression include for instance colour cell compression (CCC), joint photographics expert group (JPEG) compression and block truncation coding (BTC) compression. At the present, video data transmission and, in particular, live video data transmission via wireless communication networks, such as GSM, GPRS and UMTS, and via broadband is an area of tremendous interest both among users and manufacturers of networks and communication devices, such as computer systems or mobile phones, as well as among providers of network services. Due to, inter alia, bandwidth limitations and/or to too low capacity of the networks, especially the wireless networks, and since video information involves a large amount of data per video image or frame, the quality and/or the transmission rate of the video data is often inferred, which results in an inferior image quality at the receiving device. This implies in particular at the transmission of live video data, for example, at surveillance applications. Furthermore, it is frequently desirable in a computer system to store information, e.g. video data, audio data, or seismic data, in a computer memory or a disk drive and thereby compression is also of a high importance in this context to reduce the required amount of memory. Thus there is a need for compression methods which provide compression additional over that of the prior art which allow an adequate reproducing of transferred information, in particular, video information and live video information.